Trailer Exaggeration as a rule

Not eligible for AIA CES Credits

The lesson deals with the long design, theoretical and experimental activity of the architect and designer Andrea Branzi. A very diversified professional activity where the project aims at connecting different territories, starting from multiple stories and origins.

An independent vision, that of Andrea Branzi, which starts from childhood and from both a family and geographical context: Florence. This city, located on the Arno river, is a very fertile human territory for the architect’s education, on the one hand for the influences and references, on the other for the creative and political experiences.

Indeed, within this framework, the Radical movement came to existence, of which Andrea Branzi is one of the protagonists, as founder of the Archizoom Associati group.

The Archizoom group represented one of the leading Italian and international avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, along with Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat.

Based on this, the lesson deals with the themes and characteristics of the Radical movement, of a research "not against something but in favor of" a renewal in the different fields of art. What emerges are the central questions of the architect's activity: the writing, the lack of method, the continuous research, the experimentation, the creative activity far from the logic of the market.

The key element - the rule - is the exaggeration, by improvising and surprising as a necessary condition and as a reaction to a certain type of world.

Branzi's words thus manage to tell not only a time but a way of looking at things, thinking, opening up to the projects that have characterized his work experience: from the idea of the continuous city - the No-Stop City - to design, up to the new urban visions that propose a coexistence between humans and animals.

The ArchiTALKS concludes, then, focusing on the figure of the architect, reflecting on the teaching and on the present of art and architecture.

Educational objectives 

• You will get to know the references of the production and research of the architect and designer Andrea Branzi, starting from the biography up to his education background, places and people;
• You will investigate further the ideas and themes of the Radical movement, knowing its protagonists: from Archizoom (of which Branzi is one of the founders) to Superstudio
• You will understand a fundamental period in the history of art, architecture and design through the voice of one of its protagonists, discovering the issues and objectives
• You will analyze the projects that most characterized the professional experience of architect Branzi, where research and unpredictability, experimentation and "exaggeration”, represent some of the fundamental elements to understand the projects: from the No-Stop City to the urban visions for the contemporary city through some design milestones